Discovering the eternal blonde bombshell

Dubai: Marilyn. Marilyn Monroe. The name says it all. The curvaceous blonde that gentlemen preferred.

Was she a star? Was she an actor par excellence, a natural? Was she just the distilliation of the dreams of many men and women?

When you watch her movies, no matter the fluttering eyelashes, you get the sense that something else is going on.

She's laughing at the world around her, playing to them and you - the audience - are in on the secret.

That sense of shared whisperings is captured with almost breathtaking accuracy by Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn.

She is the woman who got Elizabeth Taylor knocked off magazine covers.

Only flaw

The only flaw in the portrayal, if you would call it that, would be that Williams is a rather fit version of the woman who made Chanel No 5 into a night garment. Simon Curtis' first feature film venture is quietly clever.

Following the life of documentary filmmaker Colin Clark's brief exposure to Marilyn during the making of The Sleeping Prince with Laurence Olivier, well portrayed here by Kenneth Branagh, the movie is the study of a quixotic child-woman who loved stardom but hated the trappings that drove her "crazy". A definite Oscar nod.